Ensuring Poverty. Felicia Kornbluh
features of TANF were elimination of the entitlement to aid for people who qualified for it; imposition of draconian rules on those who received assistance; dislodging of cash aid as the core principle of welfare; and a dramatic increase in budgetary and administrative flexibility for the individual states in implementing the law.
The new rules for recipients included time limits, work requirements, and policies regulating reproductive decisions and family forms. These rules could be used as a textbook example of reproductive injustice; by design, welfare reform made it harder for poor people to parent and constrained all their decisions about whether, when, and with whom to bear and raise children. Time limits imposed tight deadlines on individual transitions to economic self-sufficiency. Work requirements compelled recipients to take low-paying jobs, even at the cost of further education or training in preparation for better-paying jobs. Fertility control incentives and pressures stigmatized and punished childbearing while poor and unmarried. The stated justification for all these changes was that they would promote participation in the labor market, discourage childbearing by unmarried low-income women, and support married family life among low-income biological parents and children. Reducing women’s poverty, enhancing their well-being, and affirming their equality were not among the stated goals of PRWORA or the TANF program.
In addition to ending the entitlement to aid and conditioning benefits on obedience to harsh new rules, welfare reform ensured poverty by permitting states to use TANF funds for the nonpoor and failing to insist that the aid poor families do receive support incomes at levels that can sustain families. Since 1996, there has been a steady increase in what some advocates call the “TANF misery index,” which adds together the percentage of poor families not receiving TANF and the percentage gap between the TANF income of those who manage to receive it and the official poverty line. The TANF misery index for 2012, the last calculated before we finished this book, was the highest ever: 74 percent of low-income families with children were not receiving TANF aid, and there was, overall in the United States, a 73 percent gap between average TANF grants and poverty as the federal government defines it. These numbers represent dramatic changes from the time before welfare reform, when 28 percent of poor families with children did not receive public assistance, and there was a 65 percent gap between grants and poverty.3
Welfare reform policy amplified states’ rights to cut direct aid to the poor and weakened their ability to support poor families more generously. In 2016, states spent just 25 percent of their TANF funds on cash grants to TANF clients, down 70 percent from prior to the implementation of welfare reform.4 While national law mandates certain levels of spending by states from their own funds, it simultaneously permits states to count spending on proselytizing services as spending on welfare. Tightening the chokehold on direct financial assistance to families, national TANF law authorizes states to channel increasing shares of federal TANF funds to programs and services and away from cash aid.5
We have enough evidence now to assess welfare reform. TANF has, indeed, increased participation in the labor market by recipients and former recipients of aid. But the work lives of mothers who joined the labor market under pressure from welfare rules or time limits have not been secure. Wage work has not kept low-income single mothers or their children out of poverty. Nor have the publicly funded promotion of marriage and fatherhood eliminated the economic vulnerability of mothers who raise children on their own. Welfare reform’s rules and incentives promoting married reproduction and child raising have not reversed the rise in single motherhood, improved marriages, or made life better for children who are raised by parents who lack economic resources. In fact, at its most brutal, welfare reform has broken families, as sanctions, the drastic reduction in cash benefits, and time limits have driven some mothers to surrender children to foster care and adoption.6 Rather than empower families economically to rise out of poverty, welfare reform has proliferated policing mechanisms against the poor while repudiating the original purpose of welfare: income support to help custodial parents make ends meet.
As a result of its many defects, TANF has done little to diminish or mitigate women’s and children’s poverty. The single-mother poverty rate remains shockingly high at 35.6 percent overall, 38.8 percent for African American female-headed families, 40.8 percent for Latina-headed families, 42.6 percent for Native American female-headed families, and 41.5 percent for families headed by foreign-born women.7 Despite this, policy makers in both political parties refuse to address family poverty as a women’s issue, rooted in intersectional inequalities of gender, race, nativity, and class. Democrats generally have shunned a feminist agenda centered on the disproportionate poverty of single mothers and have specifically avoided advocacy of poverty-focused social policy in preference for championing improvements for a raceless (white), genderless (male) “middle class.” Republicans, for their part, have for years reflexively engaged in “dog-whistle” politics, using soft-core racism to stoke both latent and explicit racist hostility—for example, by mobilizing tropes of poor people as “lazy” and “dependent.”8 More recently, one wing of that party has pursued a more overt form of racialized and gendered politics, less a dog whistle than a loud, ringing alarm. Both parties obscure the unrelenting scale of poverty among single mothers raising children, instead pitching their appeals to different segments of the middle class. We think of this as snooze-mode politics, a failure to acknowledge the all-too-obvious gendered and racialized dimensions of poverty and suffering, an unwillingness by leading politicians and some influential intellectuals to wake up.
Despite the persistence of single-mother poverty, on its face a signal of PRWORA’s failure, welfare reform has become a model for safety net policy in the United States. As welfare participation has dropped under the 1996 welfare law, the law’s main features, including work requirements and surveillance of recipients’ family behavior, have been exported to other antipoverty programs, such as SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps) and public housing. As we write, many Republicans have called for adding work requirements to Medicaid participation, while Republican Speaker Paul Ryan has proposed replacing cash aid under the Supplemental Security Income Program (SSI) with services to prepare recipients for work.
One of the most remarkable aspects of this area of public policy is how normalized it has become, how little debated in mainstream politics. It was not always so. Most current-day discussions of welfare reform claim that the policy grew from a wide, bipartisan, consensus.9 But history says otherwise: many Democrats opposed the main features of the law President Clinton ultimately signed, which Republicans drafted shortly after they took the majority in both houses of Congress. Many continued to challenge their colleagues in Congress and the administration over the implementation of PRWORA and its reauthorization. Leaders such as Representative Patsy Mink and former administration official Peter Edelman argued that President Clinton betrayed Democratic Party principles when he signed PRWORA.10 They took issue with the substance of the law, especially the clause in it that ended an entitlement to aid for impoverished mothers with children. Mink and other women of color Democrats also took issue with the debate that preceded and undergirded PRWORA, which was characterized by overt racial and gender stereotyping and a marked disrespect for the work mothers of all backgrounds and income levels do to raise children.11
Representative Mink and other feminists were especially aroused by the ways both the welfare debate and welfare policy imposed inequality on low-income single mothers. For example, they pointed out that the preamble to TANF policy ordained that heterosexual marriage and the greater presence of fathers in low-income homes are the best solutions to women’s and children’s poverty, while TANF provisions deliberately restrained and regulated the choices available to mothers once they enrolled in welfare. In these and other ways, TANF contradicted the basic principles of feminism, that women’s lives matter as much outside marriage as in it and that they are self-sovereign citizens whose government has a role to play in ensuring their access to good lives.12 Social justice feminists like Mink, along with some other liberals, argued that emphasizing marriage and regulating mothers’ intimate and family decisions diverted attention from economic and gendered sources of poverty, such as low wages, structural unemployment and underemployment, domestic violence, and the large portion of men of color involved in the carceral system.
The robust debate that occurred in the Clinton era has been forgotten in part